


Runs a Joy with Silken Twine

by Banhus



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: History bits!, M/M, Pining, Post-Apocalypse, Repression, South Downs Cottage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-19
Updated: 2019-07-19
Packaged: 2020-07-08 21:14:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19876180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Banhus/pseuds/Banhus
Summary: Crowley was good with change, shedding names and hairstyles along the way like so much old skin. Aziraphale disliked change vehemently, but couldn’t help but worry that he really ought to, himself, after finding out that Heaven was, well, not what he’d thought. He’d spent a lot of time writing reports, keeping his head down, and so on; he’d been a Good Angel - or at least within acceptable parameters - and now he didn’t know what that even meant.On a second, much deeper level, he worried that he should maybe have changed years ago.





	Runs a Joy with Silken Twine

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Blake, who presumably wasn't talking about snakes (I am, though.) The American poet mentioned is Denise Levertov. Also many, many thanks to Ganelon8 for catching a whole bunch of errors.

The summer of the almost apocalypse sloped into a late autumn, and nothing much changed until it did: the weather tipped into heavy rain and dark evenings as suddenly as a seesaw coming down, and Crowley did something new with his hair. 

Aziraphale had already had a long day at that point. He’d gone across town on the rumour of a first edition Blake print, and gotten caught in the downpour on the way back. Even with the print wrapped in a little miracle to keep it dry, he’d had to take the bus. He shook out his umbrella outside the bookshop, and ducked inside with a small sigh of relief, shedding his waterlogged tweed coat as he went. He’d only just made himself a cup of hot chocolate and gotten dry socks on when Crowley swept through the door, dripping _everywhere_. 

“ _Really_ , my dear,” Aziraphale said, indignant, and then noticed that Crowley’d grown his hair out long again, and gathered it into a bun on the back of his head that looked messily assembled in an extremely fastidious sort of way. “Oh. You’ve changed it.”

“No?” Crowley asked, twisting as if he could see the back of his own head if he only tried hard enough.

“It’s fine,” Aziraphale said reflexively. 

Crowley eyed him for a moment, then ran a hand over his hair; the bun shrunk to a small knot, and thick red curls dropped down to his shoulders in a more familiar style. “Just a thought,” he said, rolling his shoulders, and wandered through the shop to the kitchen to get his own drink. 

Crowley had realised the implications of the respective home offices no longer conducting surprise inspections before Aziraphale did. He still called, sometimes, to see if Aziraphale was busy, but mostly he just showed up, and draped himself over the nearest soft surface to nap or read.[1] They still had clandestine lunches in the park, though that was more for the benefit of the ducks than anything. Aziraphale didn’t mind, normally - that was what Crowley _did_ , saw an opening and took it. He frowned down at his cocoa. 

“Now’s not really a good time,” he said. 

“Mhm?” Crowley said, reappearing with a mug that smelled heavily of rum. 

“Look, Crowley, I’m really rather busy today, I’m afraid, and -”

“Right,” Crowley said, looking down at Aziraphale’s book. It was poems; an old gift from Crowley. 

Aziraphale felt himself colouring, but soldiered on: “Right. Work. I need to do inventory, and -”

“I’ll just leave, then…?” Crowley said, letting the end of the sentence trail off into a very loaded silence. When Aziraphale merely nodded, keeping his eyes firmly on Crowley’s shoes (which were new, _also_ , some sort of patent leather imitation snakeskin), Crowley set his mug down on the corner table with a loud thump, and gestured at himself. “I’m a demon. You can’t lie to me. Well, you technically _can_ , I suppose, but you’re bad at it. Tell me what’s got you all twisted up, and I’ll go. Is it Gabriel? Has he been back?”

“I’m just rather busy -” Aziraphale began, but when Crowley scowled, something in his expression shuttering, he sighed, and continued. “Should I be doing more? I took the bus home today, and one of the other passengers had this nasty cough, so I just - fixed it for her. And it occurred to me, there’s a whole hospital full of sick people, right around the corner. More than a hundred hospitals, just in England. I used to think, well, that’s Heaven’s call, they’ll do the right thing, I’m just here to thwart wiles, but - they won’t. They don’t care.” 

“Well, think of it this way,” Crowley said, “if you did go around miracling people up left and right, then Hell would have to intercede in a similar fashion. Oh, not _me_ \- I’m too busy to go around giving people boils personally, but they’d send someone to even things out. It’s not about you, it’s about letting people get on with making their own choices. ‘Sufficient to have stood though free to fall,’ and all that rot. You know that: you’ve been pushing people up to the precipice of choosing good for millennia.”

“But we haven’t even done that, what with apocalypse and all, have we,” Aziraphale said miserably. “Look, I thought it’d all turn out in the end, bend towards justice and all -” 

“Not our choice to make,” said Crowley. “Thank _someone_.” 

“- but I can’t help but think I something ought to be done differently. Heaven tried to kill you, Crowley.”

“They tried to kill you,” Crowley pointed out. “Hell tried to kill me.”

“That’s not the point.” 

“It is! You know it is.” 

“I just have a lot to think about,” Aziraphale said. “Heaven said a lot of things and - I’m not sure they’ve been talking to God about some of them. Perhaps you’d best go.” 

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” Crowley said, picking up his mug as he went, slinking his way out the door. Aziraphale heard the bell chime behind him, and rubbed his face with his hands. It wasn’t that he really didn’t believe it would all turn out well in the end; God would see to that. It was all the little in-between stuff that now felt remarkably un-seen-to, a yawning abyss of possibility, and Crowley was right, Aziraphale knew he was right, the whole point was just to give people time, and space. Still, Crowley was good with change, shedding names and hairstyles along the way like so much old skin. Aziraphale disliked change vehemently, but couldn’t help but worry that he really ought to, himself, after finding out that Heaven was, well, not what he’d thought. He’d spent a lot of time writing reports, keeping his head down, and so on; he’d been a Good Angel - or at least within acceptable parameters - and now he didn’t know what that even meant, though the whole notion of growing his hair out and putting it in a bun and not worrying about what upper management would think made him twitch.

On a second, much deeper level, he worried that he should maybe have changed years ago.

—-

In 2348 BC, they’d meant to leave Mesopotamia well before the flood came down. Noah’s ark on the horizon grew more complete by the day, and Aziraphale had plans for the Egyptians, but Crowley hadn’t left yet, and it seemed like there was always just one more wile to thwart. Besides, the bakery down the way made the most delicious honey-soaked pastries, and, well, another day wouldn’t hurt. Evidently, Crowley had thought the same; he knocked on Aziraphale’s door, dead drunk, when the first storm clouds came in. 

“S’time to go, Angel,” he said, hanging on to the doorframe for balance. 

Aziraphale put down his cuneiform tablet, dusted his hands off neatly, and shut his eyes for a moment. No more pastries, then. They both kept their eyes down as the walked to the ark, and stepped aboard, human attention sliding off them like water off - well, like water off the roof of a very large and well-constructed boat. By silent agreement, they settled in the hold, with the quiet snuffling noises of the dumb animals, and Aziraphale miracled himself up a cushioned patch of hay. Crowley, still drunk, flopped down next to him. The rain drummed on the wood above. 

“D’you know,” Crowley said. “I can’t sense love anymore. It got -” he made a vague, twisting gesture with his hands “- when I fell. Can tell what people want, instead of what they love. S’not so bad, usually. Lots of variety,” he added glumly. 

“What can you -” he began. Crowley glared at him with heavy-lidded golden eyes. "Right. Stupid question, really.”[2]

“M’going to turn into a snake,” Crowley informed him, and promptly did. He burrowed himself into a tight black knot in the hay by Aziraphale’s hip, and hid his snout under a glossy coil. The warm, heavy weight of him eased the tightening in Aziraphale’s chest that shouldn’t have been there - it was all according to God’s plan, God’s own plan. Aziraphale rested a hand on Crowley as the waters began to rise, and neither of them ever mentioned it again, though, when they got the timing wrong again millennia later at the fall of Jerusalem in 1099 AD, Aziraphale showed up at Crowley’s door with a basket so he could carry the snake from the burning city. 

—

Crowley didn’t answer Aziraphale’s calls for a few days after Aziraphale had brushed him off. Then a new Japanese-Nordic fusion restaurant opened up down the street from the corner of Crowley’s flat, and apparently Crowley could only be bothered to sulk for so long, these days. He didn’t mention the other day at all, but let Aziraphale steer the conversation toward the Blake, which had turned out genuine, while he neatly demolished a plate of tobiko and smoked cream on toasted rye-bread bites. 

“Blake was alright,” Crowley said, stealing one of the appetisers off Aziraphale’s plate. “ _A skylark wounded in the wing, a cherubim doth cease to sing_ \- you always get so mopey about birds. Did you ever hang around with him?”[3]

“I was in France at the time, I think,” Aziraphale said. 

Crowley smirked, tipping his glass of sparkling elderflower wine at him. “Crepes.”

“Precisely.” Aziraphale beamed, and took a sip of his own wine. Crowley tilted his head to look as a waiter swept past with plates for another table. He’d miracled his hair short again, his sideburns ending above the snake on his cheek. Aziraphale had always vaguely imagined the mark would taste like iron, if he pressed his tongue against it; like the fresh, iron-gall ink of the scriptorium. Was the leather jacket new, as well as the hair? The collar of it looked a little stiff to be comfortable, chafing against Crowley’s neck when he turned; there was a small, reddening mark just left of his Adam’s apple, nearly the size of Aziraphale’s thumbprint. 

“About the other day -” Aziraphale began, finding he had no idea where the sentence went after that. 

“Yeah, about that,” Crowley said when it became clear Aziraphale wasn’t going to continue. “I had an idea. If they do come for us again, London’s the first place they’ll look. We might - go elsewhere a bit. Keep our heads down. Low profile.” 

“I couldn’t leave -”

“Only for a time,” Crowley said, toying with the stem of his glass. “We wouldn’t even have to leave England; anywhere you’d like, Angel.” 

When Crowley had offered to take him to Alpha Centauri, a small part of Aziraphale had immediately begun mentally folding socks and putting coats into suitcases. A much larger part of him had known he couldn’t go. He _loved_ Earth, it was just like Mesopotamia all over again, except there wouldn’t even be an ark this time around. Even so, he’d never quite mentally unpacked, he was surprised to discover; he knew exactly what books he’d take with him already. 

“A little while, then,” Aziraphale said. “I suppose someone ought to keep an eye on Adam, still, and I really ought to thank Anathema for the loan of her book - and the next village over is on the coast. We could get a cottage, fresh fish - I haven’t lived by the sea in ages.”

“A kitchen garden, a really extravagant wine cellar -”

“You’ve quite tempted me already, my dear,” Aziraphale told him.

—

In the year 665 AD, Aziraphale nestled deeper into his cowl at the new monastery of Streoneshalch. Heaven had fervently strong opinions on the correct calculation of Easter, and he’d been sent to nudge things along on the right mathematical tracks. He’d stayed for the excellent fish. Besides, as saints went, Hild was quite comforting to be around. Like with most saints, there was the sense that whoever made her had jabbed the parchment of the world too hard with the metaphorical quill and punched a small hole to the light beyond. Unlike most saints, she’d settled in nicely as an abbess rather than going off to personally fistfight demons or tell the Roman emperor to his face that he was wrong. Aziraphale had been quite enjoying himself until a contingent from Mercia had shown up to pay their respects.

One of the emissaries from Mercia stretched out languidly next to him, warming his hands close enough to the brazier that his tunic should have caught fire. It didn’t.

“What are you even _doing_ here,” Aziraphale said. “She’s a saint. She can’t be tempted.” 

“Of course she can,” Crowley said. “And if not her, the monks. Mmmm, the fire is nicssseee. It’s too wet and cold on this blasted isssland.” Crowley tended to go a bit serpentine while basking; despite himself, Aziraphale thought it somewhat endearing.

"She’ll see what you’re up to. Remember St Patrick?”[4]

“Going to tattle on me, Angel?” Crowley asked. 

Aziraphale shot him a deeply unimpressed look and inched closer to the fire himself. “Look, it’s just - nice here. It’s all swords and horses out there, and I only just got the mud out of my hair after Catraeth. Besides -” he dipped his eyes to look at Crowley, who wore his tunic unlaced in a way designed to remind any viewers that it did, in fact, come right off "- Heaven frowns on that sort of thing in its agents.[5] She _won’t_ , really, Crowley.”

Crowley blinked up at him, looking oddly taken aback, then gestured at a hunched up figure trudging across the courtyard, just out of reach of the firelight. “Perhaps something else, then. Spot of envy? That one wants to sing with the rest of the monks, but can’t carry a tune in a bucket.”

“Oh no,” Aziraphale said, looking after the man. “I hadn’t realised. He must feel dreadfully left out.” 

“It’s all he wantsss,” Crowley said. “Maybe he watches through the window, or listens from the outside when they sing. Just _ripe_ for wiles.” 

“Excuse me for a moment,” Aziraphale said, hurrying after the retreating man. He gave Crowley a quick glance over his shoulder as he went, and the demon smirked at him, eyes gleaming golden in the firelight.

—

Crowley managed to secure a likely cottage through means Aziraphale didn’t pry into too hard, and by mutual assent, they stopped by Tadfield on the way down from London. Adam, with the irrepressible ability of youth to take baffling things in stride, seemed to have recovered from the shock of being the Antichrist quite nicely. Aziraphale and Crowley had just found a park bench down by the village pond from which to watch (wearing trench-coats and suitably wide-brimmed hats) the Them and Dog experiment with the relative buoyancy of newspaper boats when Anathema sent Newt to ask them in for tea. 

“They’re doing fine,” Newt told them, with a quick glance across the pond. Brian had somehow managed to fall in, and was now making theatrical groaning noises as he clambered back onto the shore, completely covered in mud. “Just being kids. Unless there’s something new -”

“No, no,” Aziraphale said quickly. “We just thought it’d be best if we had a quick check.”

“Anathema and I are keeping an eye on them. Well, mostly Anathema is. I can’t do any of that -” he wiggled his fingers about vaguely “- aura stuff. Made scones though.”

As it turned out, Newt’s childhood spent fervently poring over engineering manuals and computer boards made him excellent at following instructions, once you got the fervent loathing anything electrical held for him out of the way. The scones were moist, and studded with bits of cherry and almond, and after shifting awkwardly around Crowley for about fifteen minutes, Newt excused himself. He’d sort of fallen into a job as the village repair man, and Mr. Ainsley’s roof was leaking. 

“I could help with that,” Crowley said, smiling to himself as Newt all but tripped over his own feet assuring him that no, no, it was all fine, completely under control.

“No, I really think I should,” Crowley said, passing the other half of his scone off to Aziraphale, and following Newt out the door with the general air of someone who intended to be supremely unhelpful, and have a lot of fun doing so.

“I’m sorry about that,” Aziraphale told Anathema. “Demon, you see.”

“Will he actually help with the roof?” 

“Oh, probably. Crowley’s an excellent carpenter - hung around with the right people, I suppose. But the poor man’s going to tie himself up in knots just _wondering_.” Aziraphale paused for a moment, fiddling with his teacup, before continuing. “It was very kind of you to invite us in. Stroke of luck for me, really, I’d been meaning to drop by. Your, erm, marvellous book of prophesies -”

“Still smells like smoke, yes.”

Aziraphale felt his ears redden. “Ah. I’m very sorry about that; I was going to return it, eventually. I only meant to ask - I only had a short while with it, and your family has been studying it for so very long, and I do have a few questions about, well, not the future per _se_ , more Heaven’s overall -”

“I’ll save you the time. Nothing in that volume going beyond the apocalypse.”

“Ah. Pity.” Aziraphale said. Then the rest of the sentence caught up to him. “ _That_ volume?”

“Mm-hm,” Anathema said, “there was a sequel. I decided to burn it.” She took a neat bite of her scone. It occurred to Aziraphale that while Anathema knew what had happened to her book wasn’t exactly his fault, that didn’t mean she wasn’t still mad at him.

“But - the historical value alone -”

“It was my book to burn.”

Aziraphale took a steadying draught of what had, a moment ago, been tea. “What if there’s another apocalypse, how would we ever - _Anathema!_ ”

“Aziraphale,” she said, not unkindly. “We didn’t, in the first place. Adam did, and Newt, and Pepper and Brian and Wensleydale. Ordinary people, saving the world because they loved their ordinary lives, rather than because there was a four-hundred year-old prophecy saying so. We got them there on time, we helped a little, that’s all. I’ve spent my whole life being a professional descendant, poring over that book, trying to figure out what Agnes meant, what she wanted from me. I’d like to try to live my own ordinary life, now.” She twisted the lid back on the jam jar with the sort of enterprising gleam in her eye that, in Aziraphale’s experience, mostly occurred in people who went on to live quite un-ordinary lives. Still, he took her point. 

“Besides,” she continued, stacking the plates, “now that I’m actually seeing someone, it’s kind of a relief not to be reminded of Agnes watching all the time. She’d probably find the handcuffs really funny.” 

Aziraphale blushed, and stood to help her with the washing up. Fifteen minutes later Newt’s abomination of a car skidded into the drive in a shower of gravel, and Aziraphale watched from the kitchen window as Crowley unfurled himself from the passenger side with a neat, sinuous shudder. He had a lot more limb than seemed like it should have fit inside the Wasabi. Over the years, whenever something particularly beautiful or terrible had happened, Aziraphale had comforted himself with knowing that Heaven was watching, too. Or reading his reports, at least. He'd done his best with the first snowfall, had bought a synonym dictionary[6] when the Greeks got really into doing stuff with lamb and yoghurt, and had thrown it out sometime during the long, grinding decades of the Black Death. Now, Aziraphale watched Crowley lean against the Bentley, waiting for him, the long curve of his torso, and felt the absence of Heaven like an aching flutter in the pit of his stomach.

—

Three days after Aziraphale gave Crowley the flask of holy water, he’d found a book of poetry on his desk. One of the pages had been dogeared - unnecessarily, too, Crowley had marked the page with a note as well. Aziraphale’d smoothed the crease out with a small miracle as he read: _‘a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying’ - got a bit carried away, did we? -A. J. C._ The poem was by an American, and meant to be from the perspective of the monk from Whitby, long ago. Aziraphale could recognise a thank you that wasn’t _technically_ a thank you when he saw one; Crowley was very good at loopholes. He’d put the book in the back, on a high shelf, well away from prying customers. Very occasionally, when Aziraphale’d had a long day, he’d take it down - _nothing was burning, nothing but I, as that hand of fire touched my lips and scorched my tongue_ \- and brush where the crease had been, imagining Crowley pressing the corner of the page down with careful fingers. 

—

“Did you ask Anathema what you wanted to?” Crowley asked as they pulled out of Tadfield. Aziraphale looked over at him, surprised, and Crowley shrugged. “You kept fidgeting during tea. I know you, Angel.”

“I did,” Aziraphale said. 

“And?” 

“It wasn’t anything I didn’t know already, I suppose.”

“Hmh,” said Crowley. “Well, what was it?”

“Heaven,” Aziraphale said, lapsing into silence, watching several dark clouds drift across the sun, and then, after a bit: “Anathema’s still angry about the book. It smells like smoke. I’d have tried a small miracle to get some of it out, but she wouldn’t even let me near - Crowley?”

Crowley’s face was doing something complicated, and he was running his fingers compulsively along the steering wheel of the car as if to reassure himself it was still there. 

“Probably sensible not to let you near it, Angel,” he said in a very even tone. It was the sort of tone that reminded the listener of the thin crust of ash that formed over boiling pits of lava. It sounded very carefully normal. Aziraphale knew the almost-pocalypse had been hard on Crowley. He’d assumed it was the sort of hard that was upfront about it; a spiritual punch in the face that you could get on with healing from almost immediately, rather than the lingering ethical hangover he seemed to have developed himself. Discovering that the raw, serrated edge in Crowley’s voice that had been there just after the bookshop fire was still there, deep down under all the drawling and smirking, made Aziraphale want to fetch Crowley a basket and a heat lamp. The impulse tugged at a half-articulated thought he’d been wrestling with. 

“I was surprised you didn’t turn into a snake, there. At the end. Middle. What we thought was the end.” 

“Considered it. Decided it wouldn’t help. If we didn’t stop things then they’d just be - worse. Forever.” 

“I’m glad you didn’t. I hadn’t been sure - when I saw you in that café - and I’d have been useless in the Great War. I’m no good with change,” Aziraphale said slightly desperately, feeling some obscure need to explain. “I’m no good with change, _at all_.”

“I know,” Crowley said, “you’re pretty much the same as when I met you.”

“I certainly am not! I disobeyed Gabriel -“

“You gave Eve your flaming sword and lied to God’s face about it because you felt it was the right thing to do about five minutes before I first saw you,” he pointed out. “I got sent up to foment some disobedience and you made me look like a blessed amateur. You haven’t changed a bit, Angel.” 

Aziraphale blinked at Crowley. “But I -” he had changed, hadn’t he? There was the Arrangement, for starters, dealing with a demon, with Crowley, though that was - well, it wasn’t like he’d disliked Crowley, ever, it was more a case of gradually discovering that he _could_ spend time with Crowley. And if he hadn’t changed, then maybe that wasn’t the question at all - maybe he wasn’t meant to, and Anathema and Crowley were right, letting people get on with having their lives in peace was enough. Maybe the question wasn’t what should he do, but what, now that he could choose, did he want. Aziraphale wasn’t in the habit of denying himself pleasure. He liked wine and books, very good food and solid well-made clothing (especially if it came in tartan). It should have been an easy question.

“But…?” Crowley prompted, and Aziraphale realised he’d trailed off. 

“But nothing. You’re right, I suppose, my dear. Have you changed, do you think?”

“Not in six thousand years,” Crowley said after a while. His sunglasses were on, and they caught the odd, purplish light of the heavy clouds above. “Not in any way that matters.” 

—

Aziraphale had worked in the scriptorium at Streoneshalch, and because he’d picked up an early reputation for being very kind, very particular and utterly impossible to work with, he was allowed to work alone. It was inefficient; normally maybe four or five monks would work on books together, doing the lettering in their own separate quires before passing them along for stitching and illumination. Aziraphale had done his own books, in his own time, which was slow, and swapped back and forth between text and image as he pleased. In 668, a travelling scald had performed some of Aneirin’s old poem in the monastery, telling them how men went to Catraeth and died. Aziraphale had slipped out to the scriptorium, thinking of how Crowley had miracled the dark mud from his clothes when he found him on the battlefield, a steadying hand on the back of his neck. The copy of Genesis he’d been working on had beautiful borders, intricate knots in red and green. Half-consciously, Aziraphale had inked in a black snake, curled into the weave down alongside the long lineage of Adam. The Genesis burned in the Cotton fire, years later, but less than a century after _that_ , Blake wrote a poem - _under every grief and pine runs a joy with silken twine_ \- and Aziraphale had thought, yes, that was it exactly.

—

There was a spot at the centre of Aziraphale’s right palm that always felt a little warm. That was the thing with being a principality; you were created Whole, and Whole, for a principality, included a flaming sword issued for Justice, the Enforcement of. Aziraphale had given his sword away because he’d looked at it, the wicked sharp edges and burning steel, and thought, well, best use it for its intended purpose, then. It hadn’t stopped being him just because he’d given it to humanity, and he’d always had a vague sense of it - it would come back when he needed it, but Justice, he’d found, needed a sword much more rarely than you’d expect.[7] St Augustine had said that mankind might approach God’s ineffable plan through memory, which, like God, was unbounded by time, and which, also like God, was much, _much_ bigger than the conscious mind could comfortably hold. He might have had a point, Aziraphale sometimes thought; hard not to have at least one, given how much he went on. Still, sometime after Rome, it had occurred to Aziraphale to ask Crowley how he’d managed to tempt Eve in the first place, and Crowley’d shrugged. 

“Wasn’t so hard. Came up as a snake, told her how nice, how wonderful tassting the apple was, crissssp and juicy. Hadn’t done me any harm, surely a small bite - that sort of thing. Barely needed a nudge. For people meant to live without knowledge, whoo-ee, did God _ever_ make them curious.” 

“You ate the apple?” 

“Just a taste,” Crowley’d said. “Just a little _nip_.” 

Aziraphale had wondered at the symmetry of that, his sword passed down the line of man, and a small part of that first apple, shared in the blood all the way down the branching family tree, in Crowley. Then he’d set it aside; another part of a great plan that would come together before him in the end. Early days, anyway; they’d come so far since then, Aziraphale had thought. Still, standing in the doorway of the cottage Crowley had acquired, watching the rain begin to drip outside as Crowley inspected the rows of late carrots and perennial herbs like a drill sergeant surveying the recruits, his memory coughed up the thought again. Then, cat-like, it coughed up another one, full of uncomfortable half-digested _bits_ : about twenty minutes after he’d handed over his sword, Crowley had come up to him at the Eastern Gate. Crowley’d been beautiful, but everything was beautiful in those days. Aziraphale had stretched a wing over him to keep him from the rain, (like he’d put his hand over Crowley’s scales on the ark) and wondered at his red, red mouth (Crowley’d taken a bite of the apple, just a nip). Everything about that memory had been layered over by later knowledge and events. The memory seemed to come back to him now wholly unchanged, seeing Crowley for the first time, and thinking: oh, _wow_. 

He’d forgotten about that because it was embarrassing, of course, and also because whenever his thoughts strayed down similar paths over the following centuries, and started mentally holding up little pictures of Crowley next to Michelangelo’s nuder works and _wondering_ , he would shove them into a very small box at the back of his brain and hope Heaven had been - hadn’t been - well, he was an angel, after all. Heaven frowned upon that sort of thing in its agents. The thought Aziraphale had never quite looked at clearly enough to articulate was this: if they _did_ , if Crowley would, then Heaven would pull Aziraphale in for a stern talking-to, and then, as an afterthought, they’d kill Crowley. They’d kill him the same way you’d kill the mice getting into your prize grain, or the people of lower Mesopotamia.

“You’ll catch cold, come inside,” Aziraphale called to him across the garden. 

Crowley shook his head. “Demon. I can’t catch cold, and these need seeing to.” He turned his head to slowly, slowly look at the carrots, and said in a voice like liquid nitrogen: “ _Don’t you_.” In the distance, there was an ominous clap of thunder.

“Well, you don’t like rain, anyway,” Aziraphale said sensibly. “I’ll make you cocoa. I -” Crowley’d taken his sunglasses off, and rolled his sleeves up to his elbows. His forearms were slender and pale, and the normally neat peaks of his hair were smoothed down by the rain. It was rather like skidding out on ice, the way the words went right out from under him, and Aziraphale slammed face first into the realisation that he needed to know whether Crowley, in fact, _would_ , immediately, or he might _just die_. 

A small part of him recognised that that was probably hyperbole. It was drowned out by six thousand years of repressed pining unrepressing itself at roughly the speed of Crowley miracling the dirt from his hands. 

Aziraphale opened his mouth, closed it again, and then asked: “Do you remember the dove? On the ark. Poor thing wouldn’t fly. I told Noah ‘oh, just send it out, it’ll find land,’ and he put the little wicker basket on the railing and opened the hatch, but it just wouldn’t go.”

"Hah, yeah,” said Crowley, who was packing up a set of gleaming gardening tools in a small leather mat.[8] “It kept pecking Noah when he tried to pull it out. Took days to make it fly.” He tucked the rolled mat under one arm, and sauntered up towards the cottage like his trousers were on fire and he was trying to remove them with his hips alone.

Aziraphale swallowed. His mouth was very dry. “It might have been months,” he said. “It might have taken it months to realise -”

“What are you saying, Aziraphale?” Crowley asked, tone sharpening. Aziraphale moved aside so Crowley could squeeze past him. He smelled like wet earth, and his hands were shaking a little as he set the tools down on the table just inside the door. The uncertainty of it wrenched Aziraphale’s heart.

“My _dear_ ,” he said. “Crowley, my dearest.”

“You don’t do this,” Crowley told him. “It’s too fast, or Heaven won’t like it -” He was a few inches taller than Aziraphale, and saved them for special occasions, usually whenever Aziraphale said something nice about him. He was looming to the best of his ability now, and reached out with one hand for Aziraphale’s lapel, presumably to push him against the wall like he had in the manor. Aziraphale blinked up at him, stunned and hopeful, his lips parting on the exhale. Crowley’s hand faltered, and he gave the lapel an awkward brush instead. “So. Anyway.”

Aziraphale reached up to catch Crowley’s hand as he lifted it, holding it against his chest. Crowley’s fingers were warm beneath his, and curled into the fabric of his vest. “Heaven tried to kill you. Heaven would have let the whole world die. How can they be listening to God?”

“She’s ineffable. How would you know? All that blinding divine light, it’s probably awfully hard to see Earth through it.”

“God appears, and God is light. But does a human form display -” at this point, Crowley had loomed himself well into Aziraphale’s personal space. Aziraphale punctuated the last line by taking advantage of this and running his free hand into Crowley’s hair. It was exactly as soft as he’d begun to suspect a minute earlier, which was the first time he’d properly let himself consider Crowley’s hair in years. 

“That’s blasphemy,” Crowley pointed out, delighted, then tipped his head into Aziraphale’s hand as Aziraphale gave his hair a small tug. His eyes slid half-closed. 

“That’s Blake,” Aziraphale said primly, then: “Dear heart, it’s not God I’m asking. _Would_ you?” 

“You don’t know what you _are_ asking. I’m a demon.” 

Much as he’d pretended not to understand what Crowley had offered him over the years, an unlaced tunic, a date at the Ritz, Aziraphale had known he was turning something down. He hadn’t realised how much it had cost Crowley to keep offering. Crowley’s gaze was fixed on a point somewhere over Aziraphale’s shoulder. Aziraphale cupped his neck, gently angling his head so he could reach, and kissed him. It was a lot wetter than he’d expected. Crowley’s hair dripped into his eyes, and he worried tremendously about the mechanics until Crowley hauled him up by his vest, wrapped an arm around his waist, and opened his mouth against Aziraphale’s, at which point Aziraphale abruptly stopped worrying and instead did the mental equivalent of what a microwave does when you put tinfoil in it. 

The snake tattoo on Crowley’s cheek did not, in fact, taste like ink. It tasted like rain water and perspiration, but that, Aziraphale discovered, was entirely besides the point, which was the noise Crowley made when he tried to find out. 

“I know,” Aziraphale said, half muffled by the side of Crowley’s face. “I know what you’re asking. I know what you want.” 

“Yeah,” said Crowley, and then, with perfect certainty, “I know what you love.”

**Author's Note:**

> 1Crowley still maintained he didn’t read, of course, usually while making direct eye contact with Aziraphale and turning the page in his book. This was new. In the 1800’s, when there’d been the whole to-do about novels corrupting the morals of impressionable ladies, he’d claimed to have invented fiction. This was also a lie. He’d mostly just hung around Ur-Nammu’s workshop and suggested adding more saucy bits to that one poem.[return to text]
> 
> 2There’d been over 800 separate wants in the people they’d passed on their way to the ark, including a nap, food, a solution to that one grammar problem, a new pair of sandals, wine, wine, wine, and a inarticulate but deep-seated longing that would have been satisfied perfectly by the invention of the hot water bottle. Now, there was only one.[return to text]
> 
> 3Over the years, Crowley and Aziraphale had realised their tastes in literature were surprisingly similar. They both liked Blake, Shakespeare (though Aziraphale was partial to the sonnets and Crowley the comedies), and had initially both been very fond of Dante’s petty asides about politicians. When Aziraphale reached the part where Dante drinks from the Lethe to get into Heaven, he’d miraculously managed to lose his own copy, and Crowley’s as well, just to be sure.[return to text]
> 
> 4Aziraphale was, in fact, entirely correct here. Modern day scholars think that the story of St Hild turning snakes to stone is inspired by the large amounts of fossils on the coast around Whitby. They have it the wrong way around: most ammonites, like nearly all fossils, are part of an extended and ineffable prank pulled on mankind by God. The ones around Whitby are the result of St Hild maintaining a lifelong ‘better safe than sorry’ policy regarding snakes after meeting Crowley.[return to text]
> 
> 5Heaven had sent out an official memo early on. It was neatly notarised, very polite, and had several of the extremely fancy stamps on it. No one read it. After the thing with the nephilim, the angels all knew, and, in several cases, had screaming flashbacks on a regular basis.[return to text]
> 
> 6It was a bit of a rip-off, though Aziraphale didn’t really mind - if you were making great strides in improving wine, why _not_ suggest wine-dark as an apt description for everything? A pleasant reminder to drink that cup at your elbow before it got warm, surely.[return to text]
> 
> 7Some time after Armageddon didn’t happen, Aziraphale would come across the expression ‘when all you have is a hammer, the world is full of nails,’ think of the great Heavenly Host, swords a-fire, and go, quietly, _oh_.[return to text]
> 
> 8Crowley had got the idea from the kind of scenes in American movies where the bad guy unrolls a mat to reveal a line of what looks like dentistry implements and says things like ‘we have ways of making you talk,’ and ‘we can do this the easy way or the hard way.’ He’d even put a periodontal scaler in next to the trowel to maintain the aesthetic.[return to text]
> 
> Come say hi on Tumblr at that-banhus.tumblr.com


End file.
